Whitley Strieber > Quotes

“...endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it's all gone”
― can't remember

“Old enough to know better, but too young to care.”
― can't remember

“The old world was destroyed because of its own greed and secretiveness. Those least evolved rose to the top, as happens here. Your leaders, as you call them, are all people with damaged senses of self-worth. The damaged goods run the civilization. That’s why it cannot last."
"Abraham Lincoln was damaged goods?"
"The need to lead is a symptom.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Key: A True Encounter

“In the eyes of the others we who met them saw ourselves. And there were demons there.”
― Whitley Strieber, Majestic

“It is very easy to claim a theory of everything if you get to decide what that everything is. It is very easy to explain everything on the table if you have put everything you cannot explain underneath it in the wastebasket.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“I think he's wonderful and strange and kind of like a poem.”
― Whitley Strieber, Melody Burning

“We humans have a nasty habit of deciding to believe that things we don’t actually understand are explained in some way that we make up. And the next thing we know, we’re killing each other over these imaginings.”
― Whitley Strieber, A New World

“who are we, that we so conceal ourselves from ourselves?”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“Instead of shunning the darkness, we can face straight into it with an open mind. When we do that, the unknown changes. Fearful things become understandable and a truth is suggested: the enigmatic presence of the human mind winks back from the dark. WHITLEY STRIEBER, COMMUNION”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“Humanity could be clutching the frail barque of an outmoded world view while the wind of the mind is swaying the stars into very real craft, and out of them is coming… a faint call for help from a lady in a flowered dress.”
― Whitley Strieber, Communion: A True Story

“Beliefs are walls. Questions are doors.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Afterlife Revolution

“If love killed, let it kill him now. Maybe they would be reunited in death.”
― Whitley Strieber, Cat Magic

“The dead do not need to be called by any special techniques. The essential element is not skill, it’s love—that is to say, the creative power of objective love.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Afterlife Revolution

“Eumenes had been with her more than 400 years, Lollia nearly as long. Until now not one of her transformations had failed to last 200 years. Was she getting worse at it, or was the strength of the human stock in decline?”
― Whitley Strieber, The Hunger

“Grief is love in another form.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Afterlife Revolution

“Very quietly, hidden away from the scorn and disbelief of the people who cling to the old, dying reality, a new one is being born, and rich, fulfilling relationships between the living and what we call the dead are at the center of it.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Afterlife Revolution

“As is said in the film Jacob’s Ladder, “The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away, but they’re not punishing you, they’re freeing your soul. If you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. If you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth.”
― Whitley Strieber, A New World

“Maybe you and I are larvae, and the “visitors” are human beings in the mature form. Certainly, we are consuming our planet’s resources with at least the avidity of caterpillars on a shrub.”
― Whitley Strieber, Communion

“Until you can give up being a judge of yourself and others, you cannot begin a search into compassion.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Afterlife Revolution

“Anne says that fear of death is the basis of all violence,”
― Whitley Strieber, The Afterlife Revolution

“It’s time for us to wake up and face the truth, that we are a captive species on a prison planet, but the fact that we are so close to understanding the science of our imprisonment means that we are also just beginning to touch the key that locks the door, and if we are strong, if we defy and defeat the sinister forces that rule us now, we have a chance at last to unlock this place and do what we are able to do, that we are richly capable of doing, that those who love us—and they are out there, too—have hoped and sought that we should do from time immemorial”
― Whitley Strieber

“Whomever or whatever the visitors are, their activities go far beyond a mere study of mankind. They are involved with us on very deep levels, playing in the band of dream, weaving imagination & reality together until they begin to seem what they probably are - different aspects of a single continuum. To really begin to perceive the visitors adequately it is going to be necessary to invent a new discipline of vision, one that combines the mystic's freedom of imagination with the substantial intellectual rigor of the scientist.”
― Whitley Strieber, Communion: A True Story

“There appeared among our letters in 1988 a remarkably vivid account from a woman in Australia, who had been doing housework in the middle of the day when some very strange creatures had abruptly appeared in her sitting room. She observed a willowy being with dark, slanted eyes and a group of short, stocky ones in “brown shrouds,” who seemed to her to be workers, while the tall one was more of a supervisor. It proceeded to overpower her with its mind while the workers moved about in the background, doing what she could not imagine. After a ferocious mental struggle, during which she literally tried to crawl out of the house as she could no longer walk, all went dark. When she woke up, it was hours later. She never found out what had happened to her during that missing time. Presumably, though, the creatures who put her through this ordeal know—and perhaps, also, that is something close to the secret of the ages. In any case, one wonders, looking at Lorie Barnes’s story and the story of the Australian woman, if we are not seeing the outline of a very remarkable and unsuspected structure: we are the kobolds. They are us working, somehow, in the fields of the soul. And one day, many of the living will join them down this very strange path, as we enter this other level of humanity, where what is hidden to us in this state, is the grammar of their ordinary truth.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“films like The Never-Ending Story (1984), Stranger than Fiction (2006), and The Adjustment Bureau (2011). Have you seen any of these films? Then you understand hermeneutics. In each case, the story revolves around a protagonist engaging his own life as a fictional story being written either in this world or in another, seemingly by someone else. As he reads and interprets the text of his life, however, he discovers that its story or plot changes. He discovers the circle or loop of hermeneutics. He discovers that as he engages his cultural script as text creatively and critically he is rereading and rewriting himself. He is changing the story.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“I’d say you’d lost your mind. But you’ve been this way for the past twenty years.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Day After Tomorrow

“Maybe that’s what the quasars that stand sentinel at the end of the universe are all about—they are the spots where people like Socrates and Christ dug through; they are windows into bright and terrible wisdom. They are warnings.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Wild

“If I look into the wings, I can see Mom standing like a statue, Medea or Lady Macbeth, one of those tragic horrors, her face zombified by the steely reflected light from my funeral pyre.”
― Whitley Strieber, Melody Burning

“fear”
― Whitley Strieber, A New World

“But why is laughter so creative? It reacts to contradiction with delight is why, thus opening the road to new discoveries.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Afterlife Revolution

“The truth is that we do not and cannot know the actual condition of life elsewhere in the universe because we are presently too ignorant of conditions outside our own immediate solar neighborhood.”
― Whitley Strieber, Communion